LOWER SCHOOL: USING OUR (JELLY) BEANS: SWEET MATH SKILLS IN JUNIOR KINDERGARTEN
“There’s only six cups, so we are putting blue and purple together.”
Junior Kindergarten mathematicians are fired up about counting, sorting, and addition! This week, in addition to nature investigations, group art projects, writing for our own purposes, painting clay pots and more, JKers spent time at multiple stations focused on math. They sorted jellybeans in different ways, talking about their color and variations in shape as they went (sorting tasks are of natural interest at this age, are a great boost for fine motor skills, and are also a way to begin practicing the Math Process Skills of solving in more than one way, representing their thinking, and beginning to understand others’ reasoning). They then used the jellybeans to count with a tool called a “ten frame.” Teachers designed a game where students got two numbers, two ten-frames, and had to find out how many jellybeans there were all together. As students counted out the jellybeans onto each frame, they talked about how they knew how many there would be. Teachers guided discussion with student pairs about strategies they’d used. “How did you know it was 15 all together?” Students showed off one-to-one correspondence, the “counting on” strategy, and also ways they saw patterns that meant they didn’t always need to count every bean to know the total (this is called subitizing).
I knew this was three. I just saw it!
One student said, “I knew this was three. I just saw it! So then I counted here, four, five…” Counting to larger or smaller total quantities, spending time in talk about process & strategy, and using the ten frames all prepare students for more advanced mathematics while keeping their joy of math inquiry at the center. (And yes, at week’s end, students got to eat some of the jellybeans. And yes, different beans than they’d been handling all week.)